Fair Use Evaluator and Exceptions for Instructors eTool Released

The ALA Office for Information Technology Policy has released the Fair Use Evaluator and the Exceptions for Instructors eTool.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The Fair Use Evaluator is an online tool that can help users understand how to determine if the use of a protected work is a "fair use." It helps users collect, organize, and document the information they may need to support a fair use claim, and provides a time-stamped PDF document for the users' records. . . .

The Exceptions for Instructors eTool guides users through the educational exceptions in U.S. copyright law, helping to explain and clarify rights and responsibilities for the performance and display of copyrighted content in traditional, distance and blended educational models.

John Wiley & Sons to Use Attributor Anti-Piracy Service

John Wiley & Sons will use Attributor's anti-piracy service to track illegal use of its digital publications.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Attributor announced today that global publisher John Wiley & Sons, Inc . . . has selected its anti-piracy service as a tool to identify unlawful use of its books, e-Books, and other content online and prevent use of the infringed copies. Attributor's technology monitors more than 35 billion pages, including hosting sites and link farms, quickly identifying unauthorized copies and taking action to remove them.

"When Wiley content appears, without permission, on Web sites where users share the content free of charge or sell it without authorization, authors are cheated of their rightful compensation for their work. This affects us all, since the loss of compensation is a disincentive to authors' creativity and innovation," said Roy Kaufman, Legal Director, Wiley-Blackwell. "Wiley's agreement with Attributor will greatly enhance our ongoing pursuit of anyone who willfully infringe upon our intellectual property and will enable us to cost-effectively scale our anti-piracy efforts across the Web."

Coordinator, Library Systems at Texas Woman's University

Texas Woman's University Libraries are recruiting a Coordinator, Library Systems.

Here's an excerpt from the ad:

Performs responsible leadership and administers and supports daily operational requirements of the Libraries' information computer network system including hardware and software, online library system (ExLibris' Voyager), and web based technologies. Duties typically involve overseeing the installation of hardware, software, system upgrades, network security, web page design, interface and updates, planning and implementing a long-range automation plan, creating period reports, providing system documentation. Work is performed under administrative direction.

Rejecta Mathematica: Send Your Rejected Math Articles Yearning to Be Published

The first issue of Rejecta Mathematica, an open access journal that publishes papers that have been rejected by other math journals has been published.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

We are pleased to announce that the inaugural issue of Rejecta Mathematica is now available at math.rejecta.org! To recap our mission, Rejecta Mathematica is an open access, online journal that publishes only papers that have been rejected from peer-reviewed journals in the mathematical sciences. In addition, every paper appearing in Rejecta Mathematica includes an open letter from its authors discussing the paper's original review process, disclosing any known flaws in the paper, and stating the case for the paper's value to the community.

"Institutional Repositories: Investigating User Groups and Comparative Evaluation Using Link Analysis"

Paul Wells has self-archived his MSc thesis "Institutional Repositories: Investigating User Groups and Comparative Evaluation Using Link Analysis" in E-LIS.

Here's an excerpt:

The aim of this investigation was to look at user groups of institutional repositories. Past research on repository users has focused on authors and depositors at the expense of other users, and little is known about what types of user groups are associated with institutional repositories. This investigation used the research techniques of link analysis and content analysis to investigate links to institutional repository websites and determine what types of user groups are using repositories. These techniques were also examined for their use in providing a comparative evaluation of institutional repositories.

Two Presentations from the ALA 2009 "Digital Library Hardware Showcase" Session

Below are two presentations from the ALA 2009 "Digital Library Hardware Showcase" session.

Barnes & Noble's eBookstore Offers over 700,000 E-Book Titles

The Barnes & Noble’s eBookstore now offers over 700,000 e-book titles at $9.99 each. It will market the Plastic Logic eReader device in the future.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Barnes & Noble's launch encompasses:

  • Barnes & Noble's eBookstore offering its customers seamless access to more than 700,000 titles, including hundreds of new releases and bestsellers at only $9.99, making it the world's largest selection of eBooks available in one place.  The company expects that its selection will increase to well over one million titles within the next year, inclusive of every available eBook from every book publisher and every available eBook original, which is a fast growing marketplace.  
  • More than a half-million public domain books from Google, which can be downloaded for free.  Readers can discover and explore this rich treasure trove, including everything from classic works by well-known writers to long-forgotten and obscure titles that are historically much harder to access.
  • An upgraded version of its eReader application, which was part of the company's Fictionwise acquisition earlier this year.  This device-agnostic eBook application supports both wireless and wired access to the new Barnes & Noble eBookstore.  Millions of internet-enabled devices are currently supported by eReader, including the nation's two leading smartphone device families from Apple and BlackBerry®, as well as most Windows® and Mac® laptops or full-sized computers.
  • First-time users of the eReader will have the opportunity to download free eBooks, including titles such as Merriam-Webster's Pocket Dictionary, Sense and Sensibility, Little Women, Last of the Mohicans, Pride and Prejudice, and Dracula.  See site for further details.
  • A strategic commerce and content partnership with Plastic Logic, whose eReader device is especially designed for business professionals. Barnes & Noble will power the eBookstore for the Plastic Logic eReader device. The ultra thin 8.5 x 11 inch wireless eReader is slated to debut in early 2010.
  • The free, full-featured B&N Bookstore app for iPhone and iPod touch users, which is now the #1 downloaded book app in Apple's App Store. In addition to enabling customers to easily place orders for books, movies, and CDs, the app also lets users search millions of products simply by snapping a photo. Using the iPhone's camera, customers can snap a photo of the front cover and within seconds get product details, editorial reviews, and customer ratings – even find and reserve a copy in the nearest store. The app also includes a store locator, bestseller lists, book recommendations, and a store events calendar.

Web Collection Curator at Columbia University

The Columbia University Libraries are recruiting a Web Collection Curator (job ends July 1, 2012 with possibility of extension).

Here's an excerpt from the ad:

Reporting to the Director of Original and Special Materials and directed by a multi-divisional Working Group, this new position will play a leading role in creating a new infrastructure for web content collection in the Libraries. Columbia has received a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, to develop and implement procedures and best practices for the acquisition, description and preservation of web content, initially in the field of human rights. Columbia University's Center for Human Rights Documentation and Research holds the print archives of major human rights organizations such as Amnesty International USA and Human Rights Watch.

The incumbent will work closely a second web collection curator, selectors, archivists, digital projects staff, senior managers, scholars and individuals in human rights organizations around the world to build a "Human Rights Electronic Reference Collection." Major activities will include securing archiving permissions from human rights organizations, analyzing, harvesting, and cataloging web content, and integrating web materials with the Libraries print, electronic and archival collections. The incumbent will play an active role in ensuring that the procedures developed are sustainable and transferable to other disciplines and collections.

eSciDoc Infrastructure Version 1.1 Released

Version 1.1 of the eSciDoc Infrastructure has been released.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

  • Improved Ingest with support for pre-set states (e.g., ingest objects in status 'released'). Ingest performance has been improved significantly.
  • Support for user preferences added
  • Group policies extend the existing authorization options and allow for better support of collaborative working environments
  • Support for Japanese character sets in full-text and metadata searches, including the extraction of Japanese text from PDF documents
  • Support for OAI-PMH with dynamic sets based on filters
  • Improved and extended functionality for the Admin Tool, which now comes with a web-based GUI

Here's a brief description of the eSciDoc Core Services, which are part of a larger software suite (see the General Concepts page for further information):

The eSciDoc Core Services form a middleware for e-Research applications. The Core Services encapsulate a repository (Fedora Commons) and implement a broad range of commonly used functionalities. The service-oriented architecture fosters the creation of autonomous services, which can be re-used independently from the rest of the infrastructure. The multi-disciplinary nature of the existing Solutions built on top of the Core Services ensure the coverage of a broad range of generic and discipline-specific requirements.

University of Michigan to Offer Print-on-Demand Editions of Thousands of Public Domain Books via BookSurge

The University of Michigan will offer print-on-demand editions of thousands of public domain books via BookSurge for between $10 to about $45.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The agreement gives the public a unique opportunity to buy reprints of a wide range of titles in the U-M Library for as little as a few dollars. As individual copies are sold on Amazon.com, BookSurge will print and bind the books in soft-cover form.

"This agreement means that titles that have been generally unavailable for a century or more will be able to go back into print, one copy at a time," said Paul N. Courant, U-M librarian and dean of libraries.

"The agreement enables us to increase access to public domain books and other publications that have been digitized," Courant said. "We are very excited to be offering this service as a new way to increase access to the rich collections of the university library."

Maria Bonn, director of the U-M Library's scholarly publishing office, said the reprint program includes both books digitized by the U-M and those digitized through the U-M's partnership with Google. The initial offering on Amazon will include more than 400,000 titles in more than 200 languages ranging from Acoli to Zulu.

All of the books being offered on Amazon through BookSurge are titles that remain available in their original form at the U-M Library. The U-M has been offering a limited number of titles for reprint on demand with BookSurge and other distribution partners for the past five years. A reprint "best seller" might sell 100 copies, Bonn said.

The U-M will set the list price of each book. The agreement calls for a sharing of revenue between BookSurge and the university.

"Should Copyright of Academic Works Be Abolished?"

Steven Shavell, Samuel R. Rosenthal Professor of Law and Economics at the Harvard Law School, has self-archived "Should Copyright of Academic Works Be Abolished?"

Here's an excerpt:

The conventional rationale for copyright of written works, that copyright is needed to foster their creation, is seemingly of limited applicability to the academic domain. For in a world without copyright of academic writing, academics would still benefit from publishing in the major way that they do now, namely, from gaining scholarly esteem. Yet publishers would presumably have to impose fees on authors, because publishers would not be able to profit from reader charges. If these publication fees would be borne by academics, their incentives to publish would be reduced. But if the publication fees would usually be paid by universities or grantors, the motive of academics to publish would be unlikely to decrease (and could actually increase)—suggesting that ending academic copyright would be socially desirable in view of the broad benefits of a copyright-free world. If so, the demise of academic copyright should be achieved by a change in law, for the 'open access' movement that effectively seeks this objective without modification of the law faces fundamental difficulties.

DSpace Lead Developer and DuraCloud Integration Engineer

DuraSpace is recruiting a DSpace Lead Developer and a DuraCloud Integration Engineer.

Here's an excerpt from the DSpace Lead Developer ad:

The DSpace lead developer will work in collaboration with developers from around the world to preserve and provide open access to intellectual output from a community of over 600 top educational institutions. The lead developer will be responsible for providing technical guidance, support, and leadership to the developer community in advancing the platform to be able to effectively manage digital assets for a diverse set of requirements and applications. S/he will interact with user groups to facilitate the integration of code and documentation contributions, expedite feature requests and requirements, and organize FAQs, wiki and forum entries. S/he will work closely and collaboratively with the developers and committers on the software to come up with a technical roadmap. S/he will provide technical oversight for key architecture decisions and will work with standards bodies to ensure the application adheres to applicable standards in the industry.

Here's an excerpt from the DuraCloud Integration Engineer ad:

The integration developer will join the team designing, building, and supporting the DuraCloud durable storage service and related Web sites for the DSpace Foundation, Fedora Commons, and other open source projects. The developer will be responsible for all aspects of requirements gathering, technical analysis and development, testing and documenting both APIs and customer-facing applications, working both alone and as a member of a team. The position, which reports to the Chief Technology Officer, requires a knowledgeable, enthusiastic, and self-motivated individual with extensive experience in integrating disparate code bases and projects using browser mashups, Web services, API calls, wrappers, scripts or database synchronizations. The integration developer will focus on best strategies for integrating DuraCloud and other DuraSpace systems as the underpinning for dynamic, collaborative Web-based applications. Other responsibilities include assisting the DuraSpace team in defining project goals, leading the software engineering process, and disseminating results (including software deployment, documentation, reports, journal articles, presentations at professional meetings/conferences).

Elsevier Launches Article of the Future Project

Elsevier has launched its Article of the Future project.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Elsevier, the leading publisher of scientific, technical and medical information products and services, today announces the "Article of the Future" project, an ongoing collaboration with the scientific community to redefine how a scientific article is presented online. The project takes full advantage of online capabilities, allowing readers individualized entry points and routes through content, while exploiting the latest advances in visualization techniques.

The Article of the Future launches its first prototypes this week, revealing a new approach to presenting scientific research online. The key feature of the prototypes is a hierarchical presentation of text and figures so that readers can elect to drill down through the layers based on their current task in the scientific workflow and their level of expertise and interest. This organizational structure is a significant departure from the linear-based organization of a traditional print-based article in incorporating the core text and supplemental material within a single unified structure.

A second key feature of the prototypes is bulleted article highlights and a graphical abstract. This allows readers to quickly gain an understanding of the paper's main "take home" message and serves as a navigation mechanism to directly access specific sub-sections of the results and figures. The graphical abstract is intended to encourage browsing, promote interdisciplinary scholarship and help readers identify more quickly which papers are most relevant to their research interests. . . .

The prototypes have been developed by the editorial, production and IT teams at Cell Press in collaboration with Elsevier"s User Centered Design group using content from two previously published Cell articles. They can be viewed at http://beta.cell.com where Elsevier and Cell Press are inviting feedback from the scientific community on the concepts and implementations. Successful ideas from this project will ultimately be rolled-out across Elsevier"s portfolio of 2,000 journals available on ScienceDirect.

Librarian in Digital Library Services at Florida Center for Library Automation

The Florida Center for Library Automation is recruiting a Librarian in Digital Library Services.

Here's an excerpt from the ad:

The Librarian will be part of the Digital Library Services Group, which helps the libraries of the public university system of Florida create, manage and preserve digital information resources. The incumbent will provide support for digital special collections, electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs), archival finding aids (EADs), and other born-digital and retrospectively digitized materials. S/he will work with DigiTool, Archon, OAI data and service providers, and other commercial, open source, and locally-developed content management applications. The incumbent will provide expertise in describing digital resources (cataloging and metadata) to FCLA and library staff.

"The Dissemination of Scholarly Information: Old Approaches and New Possibilities"

Economists Omar Al-Ubaydli (George Mason University) and Rufus Pollock (Cambridge University) have self-archived "The Dissemination of Scholarly Information: Old Approaches and New Possibilities."

Here's an excerpt:

In this paper we began by setting out the basic goals of the scholarly communication system. We compared the current, journal dominated system, against those goals and found it wanting, and explored in detail alternative options in which distribution and filtering are separated and centralized filtering is replaced by a distributed, decentralized approach.

Using a simple model we explored the factors underlying the development of the current journal paradigm. There were two main factors: a) the high costs of information transmission in the pre-digital era (and, associatedly, fixed costs and economies of scale in transmission which make journals an effective club good) b) the natural complementarity of filtering to distribution which leads journals to act as filtering as well as distributional mechanisms.

With the collapse of transmission costs in the era of the Internet these original rationales for journals have disappeared. It is now possible for distribution and filtering to be separate and for the development of richer, and more complex filtering models based on decentralized, distributed mechanisms—with this latter process dependent on the first (if distribution and filtering are tied—as in the traditional journal model—distributed mechanisms make little sense).

We explored the various benefits of such alternative distributed mechanisms—and also provide a detailed description of how such a mechanism would function in appendix A. One of the main implications of our work discussion is that a crucial benefit of the open-access approach, in addition to the obvious one of reducing the deadweight loss to access, is that it permits the development of radically new matching mechanisms based on a richer set of information which offer major efficiency (and other) advantages. This second benefit, though often overlooked, is a major one, and is, in the long run we believe, likely to be the most significant.

Unfortunately, it is hard for new approaches to take hold because of the lock-in to the traditional 'closed' journal model engendered by the mutual expectations of authors and readers. Given the potential benefits afforded by innovation in this area, it is crucial that the potential of new approaches be thoroughly considered so that the scholarly community can adequately assess the options and, if necessary, take collective action to achieve mutually beneficial change.

Personal Engagement with Repositories through Social Networking Applications: Final Report

JISC has released the Personal Engagement with Repositories through Social Networking Applications: Final Report.

Here's an excerpt from the project Web site that describes the project:

The Institutional Repository has become the established technology deployed at universities and other institutions to enable scholars to self-archive their research outputs; the PERSoNA team will be embedding social networking tools which allow chat, tagging and bookmarking (amongst other things) within the repository, and encouraging users to comment on their use of our repository and make recommendations amongst each other leading to the onward discovery of further resources.

"A Networked Registration Scheme to Support Open Science"

Adrian Pickering, Christopher Gutteridge, and David De Roure have self-archived "A Networked Registration Scheme to Support Open Science" in the ECS EPrints Repository.

Here's an excerpt:

The Open Source and Open Science movements have demonstrated the success of distributed collaborative experimentation and intellectual property (IP) development. While those contributing to the effort may do so without seeking to secure IP rights, it is clear that credit and attribution are crucial to the scholarly lifecycle because they underpin reputation—when IP is created it is only fair that 'credit is given where credit is due'. We propose that there need to be systems in place, independent of the project, where the evidence of 'prior art' can be registered. The authors' thesis is that simply having such a system available will ensure proper behaviour between collaborators and foster higher productivity.

Repositories such as EPrints and myExperiment, which focus respectively on publications and digital 'research objects', can readily use such a system—the intellectual assets stored digitally in the repository can be registered by their owners. To achieve this with the necessary guarantees we need an appropriate registration scheme and architecture.

Digital Repository Resident at University of Massachusetts Amherst

The University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries are recruiting a Digital Repository Resident (one-year position).

Here's an excerpt from the ad:

The University of Massachusetts Amherst seeks candidates for the position of Digital Repository Resident. Under general supervision of the Scholarly Communication and Special Initiatives Librarian, the Digital Repository Resident Librarian explores, adapts, and implements emerging digital repository technologies in support of library and campus digital collections and publishing initiatives. Develops and manages repository projects, researches and recommends changes and enhancements, and works with other library staff to develop and implement metadata and preservation standards, and facilitates the development of workflows that accommodate new scholarly communication initiatives.

U.S. Copyright Office Proposes Rule Change for Mandatory Deposit of Electronic Works Published in the United States and Available Only Online

The U.S. Copyright Office is proposing a rule change for the mandatory deposit of electronic works that are published in the United States and are only available online. (Thanks to ResourceShelf.)

Here's an excerpt from the notice of proposed rulemaking:

The Copyright Office of the Library of Congress is proposing to amend its regulations governing mandatory deposit of electronic works published in the United States and available only online. The amendments would establish that such works are exempt from mandatory deposit until a demand for deposit of copies or phonorecords of such works is issued by the Copyright Office. They would also set forth the process for issuing and responding to a demand for deposit, amend the definition of a "complete copy" of a work for purposes of mandatory deposit of online-only works, and establish new best edition criteria for electronic serials available only online. The Copyright Office seeks public comment on these proposed revisions.

Program Coordinator for the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center at University of North Carolina

The University of North Carolina Libraries are recruiting a Program Coordinator for the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center

Here's an excerpt from the ad:

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library seeks an experienced, creative, and collaborative individual for the position of Program Coordinator for the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center. This new position will have responsibility for general management of a center that will provide digitization and hosting services for cultural heritage materials held by libraries, archives, historical societies, and other institutions in the state of North Carolina. Housed in the North Carolina Collection at the University of North Carolina Library, the Center will provide broad and integrated access to digital representatives of these materials to the citizens of the state of North Carolina and to teachers, students, and researchers across the state and beyond.

Presentations from the ALA Annual 2009 Collecting for Digital Repositories Session

Presentations from the ALA Annual 2009 Collecting for Digital Repositories session are now available. (Thanks to Digital & Scholarly).

Also see the session's annotated bibliography.